i3status-rust

i3status-rs is a feature-rich and resource-friendly replacement for i3status, written in pure Rust. It provides a way to display "blocks" of system information (time, battery status, volume, etc) on bars that support the i3bar protocol.

Getting Started

Install from one of the packages below:

• For Fedora/CentOS, you can install from the COPR.

• For NixOS, you can also use Home Manager: programs.i3status-rust.enable = true see available options

• NOTE: Installation via cargo is not supported.

Otherwise refer to manual install docs.

Configuration

After installing i3status-rust, edit the example configuration to your liking. The default location is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/i3status-rust/config.toml.

There are some optional global configuration variables, defined either at the top-level or in a TOML table.

[icons] table:

Key	Description	Default
icons	The icon set that should be used.	"none"
[icons.icons_overrides]	Refer to Themes and Icons below.	None

[theme] table:

Key	Description	Default
theme	The theme that should be used.	"plain"
[theme.theme_overrides]	Refer to Themes and Icons below.	None

Global variables:

Key	Description	Default
icons_format	A string to customise the appearance of each icon. Can be used to edit icons' spacing or specify a font that will be applied only to icons via pango markup. For example, " <span font_family='NotoSans Nerd Font'>{icon}</span> ".	" {icon} "
invert_scrolling	Whether to invert the direction of scrolling, useful for touchpad users.	false
error_format	A string to customise how block errors are displayed. See below for available placeholders.	"$short_error_message|X"
error_fullscreen_format	A string to customise how block errors are displayed when clicked. See below for available placeholders.	"$full_error_message"

Available error_format and error_fullscreen_format placeholders:

Placeholder	Value
full_error_message	The full error message
short_error_message	The short error message, if available

Further documentation

Latest release

• Blocks
• Formatting
• Themes and Icons

Master

• Blocks
• Formatting
• Themes and Icons

Integrate it into i3/sway

Next, edit your bar configuration to use i3status-rust. For example:

bar {
    font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, FontAwesome 12
    position top
    status_command path/to/i3status-rs path/to/your/config.toml
    colors {
        separator #666666
        background #222222
        statusline #dddddd
        focused_workspace #0088CC #0088CC #ffffff
        active_workspace #333333 #333333 #ffffff
        inactive_workspace #333333 #333333 #888888
        urgent_workspace #2f343a #900000 #ffffff
    }
}

In order to use the built-in support for the Font Awesome icon set, you will need to include it in the font parameter, as above. Check to make sure that "FontAwesome" will correctly identify the font by using fc-match, e.g.

$ fc-match FontAwesome
fontawesome-webfont.ttf: "FontAwesome" "Regular"

Note that the name of the Font Awesome font may have changed in version 5 or above.
You can use fc-list to see the names of your available Awesome Fonts.

$ fc-list | grep -i awesome
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-solid-900.ttf: Font Awesome 5 Free,Font Awesome 5 Free Solid:style=Solid
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-regular-400.ttf: Font Awesome 5 Free,Font Awesome 5 Free Regular:style=Regular

In this example, you have to use Font Awesome 5 Free instead of the FontAwesome 12 in the example configuration above. You can verify the name again using fc-match

See #130 for further discussion.

Finally, reload i3: i3 reload.

Behavior

Each block has a State that defines its colors: one of "Idle", "Info", "Good", "Warning", "Critical" or "Error". The state is determined by the logic in each block, for example, the Music block state is "Info" when there is an active player.

When the state is "Error", a short error will be displayed in the block. The full message can be toggled by clicking on the block (overrides any click actions defined in the config). The block will be restarted after error_interval has elapsed.

i3bar has a "power savings" feature that pauses the bar via SIGSTOP when it is hidden or obscured by a fullscreen container. If this causes issues with your bar, try running i3status-rs with the --never-stop argument, which changes the signal sent by i3 from SIGSTOP to SIGCONT.

In addition to the per-block signal config option, i3status-rs can be signalled to force an update of all blocks by sending it the SIGUSR1 signal. It can also be restarted in place (useful for testing changes to the config file) by sending it the SIGUSR2 signal.

Debugging

Run i3status-rust in a terminal to check the JSON it is outputting.
In addition, some blocks have debug logs that can be enabled like so: RUST_LOG=block=debug i3status-rs where "block" is the block name.

Contributing

We welcome new contributors! Take a gander at CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

This project is licensed under the GPLv3. See the LICENSE file for details.